Journey to the Center of the Earth Review

Summary

Rating:

Overall:Minor game design problems, occasional tedium, and one or two incredibly arcane puzzles detracted a bit from an entertaining, easy-to-play game with good graphics, a reasonably good story line, and an imaginative environment.

Deriving its name from the classic Jules Verne novel, Journey to
the Center of the Earth actually has very little to do with the
world that Verne created. Indeed, the game could have taken place
just about anywhere, with the only requirement that it be in a remote
location, apart from any connection to mainstream civilization and
society. Ariane, a professional photojournalist, is on an assignment
when a natural catastrophe sends her through a fissure in the earth's
surface — and to the land at the earth's center, where dinosaurs
still roam, and the environment is a mixture of 19th-century
lifestyle, and 21st-century technology. As Ariane investigates what
could be the scoop of her career, a story begins to unfold that makes
her realize that there is more to this place than meets the eye — a
terrible secret known only to a few, which she intends to uncover.

JTCE is an adventure game that combines both inventory and
logic puzzles. Most of these inventory puzzles are of the "find
the tool to cut the rope" or "look for something to use to
block the door" type. The logic puzzles, oddly enough, range
from the fairly simple to one or two virtually-impossible
puzzles. (One puzzle has almost no clues for it, and the ones that are
provided are extremely arcane. And a user trying to solve this puzzle
through trial-and-error will be dismayed to find that there are over
3½ million possible solutions. What's even worse is that trying
a single solution takes 20 minutes or more, due to the amount of work
and on-screen movement involved!)

The game is played in the third person, with the player controlling
Ariane's movements throughout the game. The interface is primarily
point-and-click, making Ariane move to the location of the
cursor. While this was simple to learn, there were a few glitches that
made it less than optimal. In many scenes, moving Ariane from one side
of the screen to the other took 15-20 seconds. Fortunately, there is a
way to make her "run" to her new destination — but it only
cuts the time in half. And in several places in the game, the player
needs to move Ariane from one scene to another very distant location,
requiring that every scene in between be traversed by Ariane. There
are no maps or "warps" to get to another location
quickly. And occasionally, her movements were awkward — either
heading in the wrong direction, only to change abruptly in mid-stride,
or sometimes having Ariane do a "rotating shuffle" while she
oriented herself to the direction she was to go.

The game installed with no problem, although several times during
gameplay, the action would freeze up, and I totally lost all control
of the game. This required killing (and restarting) the game — and
losing whatever progress I had made since my last saved game. From
everything I could determine, these were not system hardware problems,
but related to the actual game design itself. (For example, in one
place, I had moved Ariane into a spot from which she could not be
moved away, and no other action could take place. She kept turning
around, but was somehow "bound" to the spot where she was
standing.) And while the on-screen cursor normally changes to signify
the directions in which Ariane can move, there were many times when
this change of cursor was not present, but Ariane could still be moved
in that direction — which made depending on such visual clues
questionable, and resulted in unnecessary "random clicking"
to find the correct path.

Throughout the course of the game, Ariane interacts with many
characters. The first dilemma she faces is to distinguish whom she can
trust, as the information she is getting from them doesn't always
gibe. Dialogues with the characters are controlled by selecting
questions (and responses) for Ariane from a list presented on-screen
during the dialogues. As in most such games, it is usually necessary
to select each of the dialogue options before the game can continue;
and certainly that is the case, if Ariane is to discover what is going
on in this strange world. So while the dialogues provide a bit of
interaction on the part of the player, they really amount to
"sliced-up cut-scenes" that are played back piecemeal. At
times, Ariane's conversations seem a bit inane, but they are necessary
to progress in the game. And in one mildly frustrating situation
(which is repeated many times during the game), I would click on an
object for her to interact with, she would ask "Do I really want
to do that?", I'd click again (to confirm the action), and she
would do it.

For the most part, the graphics in JTCE are quite good. For a
change (it seems), we are presented with an adventure game that takes
place predominantly in sunlight, with lush, vibrant, high-contrast
colors. You won't have to turn down the room lights because of dim,
dark, foreboding scenes. The textures are done well, albeit fairly
simply. There are no breathtaking landscapes with high-definition 3D
renderings. However, the artwork is done well, and contributes to an
enjoyable visual experience.

The characters are animated reasonably well, although we are not
given the
close-up animations that some other recent adventure games include. In
some cases, the movements are reminiscent of typical Saturday-morning
cartoons, while at other times they seem to have been given a little
bit extra attention to detail.

The save-game engine in JTCE is one of the most unique that I
have seen. You can save as many games as you like, and every saved
game is accompanied by a thumbnail image of the scene where the game
was saved. Or, more correctly, I should say that every thumbnail is
accompanied by information about the current status of the
game. Because each saved game consists of a single JPEG image file —
with all of the other information (location, inventory items,
status of triggers, etc.) encoded within the JPEG file itself!

JTCE is a fairly linear game, in terms of the progress that
Ariane must make. While there are no pre-defined chapters, or levels,
Ariane clearly moves from location to location, and situation to
situation, in a well-controlled manner. (For example, trying to access
a location which is "out of order" at the moment will
typically result in her saying something like "I have other
things to do here first.") Within each particular location,
however, she is fairly free to move around, explore, talk to other
individuals, solve necessary puzzles, encounter the triggers that will
move her along, and generally develop the story line of the game.

Without spoiling the game, I will note that this is a
"two-ending" game. At a certain point in the game, the
player has an option that will lead to one of two possible
endings. One is fairly brief, and involves no other gameplay; the
other extends the game by quite a bit, involving more exploring, more
puzzle-solving, more characterizations, and more story line. The
reason I mention this is that, for me, this is where the game diverged
from being a really good game, to being an "okay"
game. Because it seemed that this "extension" to the game
was done as an afterthought — almost as a "hey, we don't have
enough gameplay to this thing yet; let's add something on to take up
more time". The puzzles in this section certainly do not
distinguish themselves. And most of the activity seemed, to me, to be
"make-work" — that is, doing a lot of unnecessary things,
things that did not contribute significantly to the overall story, but
which involved a large amount of moving Ariane back and forth, taking
time and energy, but not much else. My overall impression of the game,
rather than being improved by having "more game to play",
was actually lessened somewhat by the tediousness of what resulted
from selecting the second ending.

JTCE is an enjoyable game, which should provide 15-20 hours
of gameplay (if one can find a hint or walkthrough to get by the one
or two next-to-impossible puzzles). While my own reactions see-sawed
throughout the game (depending mostly on the tedium of the current
task that I was performing), I found that the game was entertaining,
and a good diversion.